There are relatively few technical problems in software, and the easy ones got solved a long time ago and packaged as libraries etc. On the other hand, there ar

There are relatively few technical problems in software, and the easy ones got solved a long time ago and packaged as libraries etc. On the other hand, there are countless business applications for software built on top of these libraries - that's why 99% of us are working on glueing other people's code together in order to provide some business value. If you don't like that, there are still some paths that are different: low-level embedded development, kernel development, driver development, database engine development etc. They're fairly niche compared to regular business apps development, and I suspect they expect more out of you as well. Also, I wouldn't blame Opensource, as what you describe does not have anything to do with how the libraries are developed (for profit or FOSS). For example, back in early 2000 there were no good FOSS application servers (a concept from the age of J2EE) and people built their web apps on top of commercial application servers, such as BEA Weblogic or IBM Websphere.